Tag: show

It’s been twenty years since Seinfeld went off the air, twice as long as the show actually ran, and in that time, Jerry Seinfeld’s efforts to distance himself from his role as “Jerry Seinfeld” have been few and far between. Unlike his co-stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Jason Alexander, Seinfeld’s primary role, from his stand-up days to the show that made him famous to his latest venture, Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee, has been a version of himself. Our fondness for “Jerry Seinfeld” is boundless – episodes of Seinfeld continue to air non-stop throughout the world at all times of the day, something that has made him a very, very wealthy man – but Seinfeld the real human has, understandably, changed. Seinfeld, undoubtedly one of the funniest men in comedy for decades, drives beautiful cars, and shoots the shit with his likewise successful and famous friends. Stripped of the affable fiction of his show – which was almost entirely about the ways Seinfeld did not like to be inconvenienced – it’s not hard to imagine the real world Seinfeld having graduated into a series of petty annoyances that are so far beyond the realm of the familiar that they barely register as human anymore. “Jerry, did you bring your car?” Norm asks as Seinfeld calls to say he’s nearby. “Seinfeld” infamously set out to turn traditional comedy structure on its head – no hugging, no learning – to brilliant effect, but it goes a long way toward explaining what’s missing from Comedians In Cars: There are no stakes. Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated Jerry owned a Porsche on Seinfeld.

NATIONAL HARBOR, MD-Last week’s ARPA-E summit was full of big ideas about the future of energy, and nowhere was that more evident than on the summit’s show floor. In the basement of the sprawling Gaylord Hotel and Convention Center, dozens of academic institutions and companies set up booths to show off what they had been working on with their grant money. From cars to recycling to electricity-generating turbines to biofuels, the warehouse temporarily turned into a montage of early-stage ideas. Most importantly, it also showed off the breadth of ARPA-E’s work: though the Department of Energy’s early-stage grant program has at times been cast as an accelerator for renewable energy exclusively, ARPA-E projects span a variety of fuels and even include some non-energy projects whose application could save industry a significant amount of energy.

The whole endeavor is in the spirit of a junior year abroad. Its hot tub is not a horny medical-waste container; it is just a hot tub. No one is voted out of the house, but people sometimes elect to leave. Whenever the viewer of “Terrace House” begins gliding too deeply into his trance-lapsing into a sober meditation on his own selfhood, for instance-a panel of Japanese celebrities pop up to comment on the action. For the Western viewer, one pleasure of “Terrace House” is to grope toward its idiom. At his first turn in the kitchen, he composes a flavorless hot pot. His gently inept courtship would be awkward in any circumstances; played out at a “Terrace House” pace, it is excruciating. The tranquillity of “Terrace House” here transforms into agonizing tension. Who could not be charmed by the tenderness between them as they share a footbath at a hot spring? Back in the studio, one of the presenters ventures, “They will be our oasis.” A refuge within a refuge, a still pool serving a sunny reflection.

HBO had been churning out original programming for decades-stand-up specials and sports programs and nudity-filled reality shows like Real Sex; mediocre sitcoms like Arli$$ and critically acclaimed ones like The Larry Sanders Show; lurid, pulpier fare like Oz-before David Chase’s gangster opus premiered. The year 2013 also saw the premiere of Netflix’s House of Cards and with it a new model for distributing shows: Unlike network channels or broadcast TV, which doled out their premier programming a week at a time for three months or so, Netflix released the whole season at once. Revolution Was Televised is a must-read history of TV running from the debut of HBO’s Oz through AMC’s emergence as a power player with Mad Men and Breaking Bad. Seitz and Sepinwall have collected their recaps-brief critical summaries of TV episodes published online as quickly as possible after the episodes’ initial airings-of those two shows in, respectively, Mad Men Carousel: The Complete Critical Companion and Breaking Bad 101: The Complete Critical Companion. The sheer volume of new shows-the thousands of hours of new stuff-and the new distribution models make it difficult for older shows to stay in circulation and for excellent new shows to impress themselves upon the national consciousness. How much of the urge to include The Simpsons or Seinfeld comes from familiarity? Would the entirety of your list simply draw from programs that were on the air when you were watching TV? Whereas an all-time-top-10 movie list compiled by a person under the age of 40 would likely contain at least a few films made before he or she was born-Citizen Kane or The Godfather/The Godfather Part II or The Wizard of Oz or Vertigo or A Clockwork Orange or On the Waterfront-how many TV shows that aired before 1978 would make the cut? Some of you might perhaps pick I Love Lucy or The Twilight Zone-but even then, these are likely shows you watched over and over again in syndication growing up. Another major difficulty that arises when thinking about which TV shows will last and be of interest to future generations is their length. So is there any point to determining a TV canon at all? There certainly are excellent TV shows, especially relative to other TV shows. There are TV shows that are produced with artistic genius and beauty and that shed light on timeless truths about the human condition.

Old Portland died on January 21, 2011 – the day Portlandia debuted. After seeing the pilot, she realized it tapped into the cultural Obama-era Zeitgeist, highlighting contrived lifestyles, emerging technology, DIY mentality, and the organic movement, by “Poking fun at some of the things people were taking so seriously in their lives.” Brownstein, who resided in Portland in the early 2000s, told the Daily Beast in 2014 that the show’s setting was “More about identifying and exploring the minutiae of how and why people live the way they do. Portland just makes a really good backdrop and is a good stand-in for other cities.” Portlandia ended up attracting an audience of highly educated, affluent city-dwellers, mostly residing in the Northeast and along the West Coast. The day the sixth season aired, the Portland band White Glove flipped the mirror on Portlandia in a parody music video where they dressed as Brownstein and Armisen. Around the time Portlandia first aired, national attention to Portland was just beginning to increase. A 2015 article in the Guardian, headlined “Is hip Portland over? How the rent crisis is displacing the city’s creative soul,” summed up the changes taking place: “Affordability, gentrification and homelessness are now the foremost political issues in a city in mortal danger of being loved to death.” While gentrification is a complex issue with many components, Helen Morgan-Parmett, a professor at the University of Vermont who wrote a case study, titled “Site-Specific Television As Urban Renewal, or How Portland Became Portlandia,” argues that the show’s on-location filming paralleled city efforts to rebrand and revitalize marginalized spaces as enterprising hubs with “Gentrifying implications.” Additionally, Portlandia became a vehicle for promotional opportunities in the city’s tourism industry; for example, Travel Portland’s website urges visitors to check out places Portlandia filmed. Portlandia’s opening sequence is filtered through a hazy green tint and set to Washed Out’s gooey song “Feel It All Around.” It presents a romanticized version of Portland with a montage of iconic landmarks, but doesn’t show the city’s homeless camps or gritty side, except for a fleeting image of Mary’s Club, the city’s oldest strip club, and even that is bathed in sexy neon. In a more elaborate and thoughtful answer, began to speak about how the show had become an easy target and a focal point for Portland’s change, but said the city’s growth was bound to happen regardless, as it has around much of the country.

Mullally is the reason Bill Hader became an actor, even though he “Never wanted to be an actor.” After Mullally saw him in one of the Second City shows, she called up Lorne Michaels of Saturday Night Live. In relaxed-fit blue jeans and a black North Face beanie, Hader doesn’t exactly fit in with the sleek, shiny, modernly deconstructivist decor of this Midtown Manhattan restaurant we’ve met at; the website for the restaurant claims it’s “Not your daddy’s steakhouse,” and Hader’s presence feels like proof of that. “Bill got SNL super fast, and he was really good at it, but it really ate at him,” says Alec Berg, who created Barry with Hader. The throwaway idea of forcing the awkward, skinny, 6-foot-1 Bill Hader into a role normally occupied by guys who look like cologne models turned out to be more than just a good sight gag. Barry’s log line makes it sound like a zany comedy, but what Hader and Berg have created is a remarkably empathetic TV show. “It’s like says: When you agree to do this, you close the door on everything else. If he quits, he dies. But he’ll also die if he keeps doing it.”The thing he’s good at is destroying him, and [acting], the thing that could save his life-he’s terrible at it,” Hader continues. Barry, perhaps fittingly, premieres just a couple of months shy of five years to the day that Hader left the show that made him a star. Professionally, things have changed so much that Hader has finally accomplished the goal he had when he skipped out on the SATs, dropped out of college, and moved to L.A.: With Barry, he’s now a director.

When they began work on “The Last O.G.” – FX passed on the series, citing creative differences, but TBS picked it up – Cedric said he expected that Mr. Morgan would be changed by his experiences. Even though Mr. Morgan could simply sit on his Walmart settlement and grow old, Cedric said this was not his desire, though he could not entirely disguise how this windfall had affected him, either. In these moments, Cedric said, Mr. Morgan would eventually regain his composure and his underlying generosity would shine through. “It might not be Peter Luger, but whatever he’s got, he’s going to show people that he appreciates them.” Ms. Haddish, the “Girls Trip” star, said that she saw a lot of genuine affection in the flashback scenes of “The Last O.G.” that show Tray and Shay’s life together when they were still young and struggling. More seriously, Ms. Haddish said she found inspiration in Mr. Morgan’s steadfast efforts to resume his career. “Now,” Ms. Haddish said, “I got her the best doctors, and she’s getting better and better. Tracy showed me, if he can get himself together and be able to work, damn, maybe I can get my mom to that level, too.” She added: “He’s a survivor. He’s a testament that if you really want to do something better for yourself or others, you can.”

In the summer of 1999, the young television producer Mike Fleiss had already achieved some early success making tacky compilation reality shows such as “Shocking Behavior Caught on Tape” and “World’s Scariest Police Shootouts,” when he had an idea for a game show, in which a wealthy man would select a winner from a group of fifty wedding-gown-clad women, propose, and then marry her. An entertainment journalist at the Los Angeles Times and a longtime fan of the show, Kaufman has procured damning production notes, revealing the show’s behind-the-scenes manipulation of participants, beginning with the ground rules established at the Agoura Hills, California, mansion where “The Bachelor” is filmed. Like Kaufman, the Canadian poet and academic Suzannah Showler is a self-professed fan of the show, and she has also recently written a book about it, “Most Dramatic Ever: The Bachelor.” Unlike Kaufman, Showler didn’t talk to any sources, because, as she writes, “Uh, I didn’t really want to.” Instead, she studies the show using the tools of literary analysis, treating it as a text whose form provides meaning. Less attuned to the motivations of individual actors, Showler is more interested in interrogating the ways in which the show works systematically-analyzing how the contestants’ life traumas are, as a rule, converted into connection, creating an economy where “Confessional narrative is a form of Bachelor currency.” In recent years, she suggests, the producers have increasingly allowed reality to enter the insular spectacle of the show. Such intrusions are carefully calibrated to imply that the show’s authenticity is total, Showler proposes, while the producers carefully control how many of its seams they will expose. How sincere is a show, they ask, that professes to be about true emotions while manipulating its participants? And what is the right amount of emotional distance that viewers should be able keep from “The Bachelor”? Nearly twenty years ago, in her groundbreaking book “No Logo,” Naomi Klein referred to a type of engagement with popular culture that she called “Ironic consumption,” wherein people, realizing their inability to detach from the often idiotic, occasionally poisonous products of capitalism, partake instead of these products’ pleasures while keeping a sense of agency and humor about it. Viewers such as herself, Showler writes, are “Aware of the preposterousness of the situation” presented on the show, and of its pandering to gendered and racial stereotypes; and yet, she writes, “I fucking love The Bachelor.” For her part, Kaufman notes that “No one takes a show about twenty-five women vying for one man seriously”; and yet, if given the chance to try out for the show, she writes, “I WOULD STILL. FUCKING. APPLY.” This admission is followed by another reversal: “That’s pretty dark, right? What is wrong with me? Why do I want to be that girl?” The fault lines between enjoyment and irony, critique and complicity, are treacherous; the back-and-forth is ongoing, insistent, recursive. The enjoyment one can glean from the show relies on this relatability, but also on the hairline gap between true emotions and interactions and their onscreen representations, and the ability to tell the difference between the two-to identify the way the artificial structures that the show puts in place do not make up the entire story.

“We didn’t think of Sarah as Buffy because we thought she was too smart and too grounded and not enough of a misfit in a sense, because Buffy was this outsider. How could Sarah be an outsider? She’s so lovely. So we brought her in as Cordelia, and she was fantastic as Cordelia. Then we went to the network, they knew that Sarah was a star from her previous work, and that she could be Buffy, and that we could do that Buffy.” In the Buffy movie, the vampires looked like regular people with sharper teeth and paler skin. Vampires don’t fly on Buffy or turn into bats because the show didn’t have the money and Whedon thought it looked silly. THE GENTLEMEN WERE INSPIRED BY A DREAM. A version of Buffy’s creepiest villains first appeared in a dream of Whedon’s; they floated toward him while he was in bed. THE HARDEST CHARACTER FOR WHEDON TO KILL OFF WAS BUFFY’S MOM. One of Buffy’s most critically acclaimed episodes is season five’s “The Body,” in which the slayer’s mom, played by Kristine Sutherland, dies of natural causes. The moments after Buffy discovers her mother dead on the couch were done in a single take, which Whedon had Gellar perform seven times. THE SHOW SPAWNED ACADEMIC COURSES…. A number of colleges and universities offer courses on the show; they’re called “Buffy Studies.” People have written books and held conferences dedicated to discussing the themes of the show and presenting papers on it. According to the Los Angeles Times, attendees at a 2004 Buffy conference “Were presenting 190 papers on topics ranging from ‘slayer slang’ to ‘postmodern reflections on the culture of consumption’ to ‘Buffy and the new American Buddhism.’ There was even a self-conscious talk by David Lavery, an English professor at Middle Tennessee State University, on Buffy studies ‘as an academic cult.'”.

In the half-decade since the wry study of startup culture premiered, the ground has shifted beneath it – the public perception of the tech industry has dimmed considerably, as has the general appeal of a TV show built around five single bros. Miller hasn’t been shy about those vices either, wearing them at times like a badge of honor – or at least a solid launchpad for comedy, with bits that have hinged on his propensity to “Drink till [he] passed out.” There had been stretches when, multiple show sources say, he looked to have things under control, and others when he’d show up seemingly under the influence, if he showed up at all. “There are a lot of different ways you can find out somebody doesn’t want to do the show anymore,” says Judge, seated now in his cluttered office on the Sony lot, a short walk from the set. Though everybody involved with the series praises his raw talent – some even employing the word “Genius” to describe him – many say it had become impossible to predict which Miller would show up on a given day. Even before Miller’s departure, the character had started to become problematic for the show’s writing staff, which was running out of ways to keep him involved in Pied Piper. “We talk about it all the time. The lack of hitting it head-on just comes down to the fact that we haven’t done a great job of finding the definitive satirical take on it.” So, for the time being, the show will stick to poking fun at the Valley’s insidious bro culture – though even that, which once felt forward-thinking, could seem out of sync with the current moment, as Judge was reminded at February’s Directors Guild Awards. The pro­ducers regularly take trips to the Valley, too, where they’ve been welcomed into the offices of Dropbox, Quora and Google; and the actors, who had varying levels of industry knowledge coming into the show, have been invited to host tech award shows, appear at product launches and, in a few cases, invest in startups themselves. While the latter’s absence will inevitably be felt, in part because his elusive whereabouts are played for comedy throughout the season premiere, Judge insists the show will go on, as it did years earlier when they lost another fan favorite, Peter Gregory, after Welch’s untimely death from cancer.